The irony couldn’t be more obvious. After staging a piece of political theater called the E-G8, which French President Nicolas Sarkozy used as a platform to champion the notion of much tougher government control over the Internet, the president today will welcome to the analog G8 meeting in Deauville, representatives from the interim governments of Tunisia and Egypt.

Without the Internet, and social media in particular, the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt would simply have never occurred.